It is known from the state of the art to use hollow fiber bundles for manufacturing dialysis filters. Dialysis filters are basically employed in various extracorporeal blood treatment processes such as hemodialysis, hemofiltration or hemodiafiltration. For manufacturing dialysis filters, at first a hollow fiber strand continuously exiting a spinning machine/device is wound/reeled onto rotating reels or, respectively, reel wheels. As soon as a rotating reel or a rotating reel wheel, respectively, is completely wound up, the wound hollow fiber strand is removed from the reel wheel and is wrapped by a film/foil which serves, inter alia, for tight, i.e. closely adjacent fixation of the hollow fibers relative to each other. Subsequently, the hollow fibers are cut to a desired length and are inserted in a cylindrical filter cartridge/introduced/put into a filter casing. The wound foil now can be removed again.
In other words, when manufacturing a hollow fiber filter module at first a hollow fiber strand exiting a spinning device is combined/aggregated into a hollow fiber bundle. When said hollow fiber strand is wound onto a reel wheel, a number of hollow fibers H present in the hollow fiber bundle can be determined with a number of reel revolutions N (H=2×N). When the desired number of hollow fibers is provided on the reel, respectively, the reel wheel, the reel, respectively, the reel wheel has to be changed. This is done with the aid of a reel changing device/a reel changing method. From the state of the art, various manually operating or automated reel changing devices with dedicated reel changing methods are known.
It is known, for example, to provide, apart from a spinning device/machine, a reel dog/trestle/frame on which a reel and, respectively, a reel wheel is mounted in a (hollow) fiber exit direction. At first, a fiber strand is wound onto the reel wheel. After completion of the winding operation, the completely wound reel wheel is manually removed from the reel frame and is replaced with an empty reel wheel. As soon as the empty reel wheel is mounted on the reel frame, the fiber strand can be wound up again. In the meantime, the continuously exiting and forming fiber strand is sucked into the waste disposal. This manual reel changing method thus has the drawback, on the one hand, that great fiber strand loss/reject/waste is occurring and, on the other hand, that two manual users or operators are necessary for a rapid reel change.